Michael Harank is at work at the Lifelong Medical Care clinic in Berkeley.

“Hello, Michael speaking.”

Registered nurse Michael Harank picks up the phone from his desk at the Lifelong Medical Care clinic in Berkeley. It’s an ordinary Friday afternoon.

The call is from a pharmacist. A patient wants to get her medication a few days earlier because she’s going out of town. Harank looks around—the doctor isn’t there. Instead of asking the pharmacist to call back later, Harank tells her that he will investigate and call her back. He pulls out the patient’s charts and starts calling around, voluntarily adding this extra task to his workload.

“It’s just easier for everybody,” says Harank. “It’s not a ‘But it’s not my job’ kind of attitude.”

Now in his 60s with grey hair, a pierced left ear, and a face with a smile always buried somewhere, Oakland resident Harank is a lifelong activist who has spent his life advocating for people with HIV/AIDS. He believes nursing is a door that opens other doors into people’s lives, because people trust doctors and nurses—especially nurses. “Activism comes from the word ‘action.’ If you’re just a person of words and don’t put it into action, then your life lacks integrity,” he says.

Harank, originally from Boston, was raised Roman Catholic. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in religious studies from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1976. He moved to New York in 1978 to join the Catholic Worker Movement, which was co-founded by Dorothy Day, the American journalist and social activist who Pope Francis praised in his 2015 speech in front of the Congress as one of the “four representatives of the American people.” (The other three were Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thomas Merton.) The movement’s aim was to provide social services to those on the margin of society. They published newspapers, opened up houses of hospitality and farming communes, and operated a soup kitchen in New York on a “no questions asked” basis.